February 24
GUEST: Adaner Usmani, assistant professor of sociology at Harvard University, and editorial board member of the Catalyst Journal of Theory and Strategy, talks about mass incarceration and the false narrative of its creation.
Did Liberals Give Us Mass Incarceration?
Why would anyone feel the need to create a false narrative about the creation of mass incarceration? Or to put it another way, wouldn't everyone in power over the last four decades want a little wiggle room? White America has extended and increased the suffering and gross injustices of Jim Crow for decades after the 1960s, the last time that our country tried to come to terms with its Black underclass.
So what is not really being said about how our "land of the free" filled its jails with people of color? Adaner Usmani suggests that it has more to do with class theory than out and out racism. And he also finds more people to blame. The reality of our caste system was explored very thoroughly in the Kerner Report, a study initiated by President Johnson as part of his "Great Society." But the results of the report were staggering. To bring a large underclass out of poverty meant that things like wars had to be put aside. The United States could not fight wars abroad and remedy its poverty problems at the same time. Our country had to choose.
Martin Luther King had said the same thing, especially in the year before his assassination. And his warnings were as stark as his words.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
Our country did continue its war in Vietnam. After all, President Johnson was always known as "Brown & Root's man in Congress." And Brown & Root was making tens of millions on supplying the war effort. The Military, Industrial Complex had already decided that the US would choose militarism over eliminating poverty.
All of us have gone along with that decision every since. We have cheered our military adventures and turned a blind eye on our racially biased caste system. It is no wonder false narratives need to be created. We live in the spiritually crippled society that MLK foresaw so many decades ago.
